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Waitress Clara Cosplay

Anyway, I won’t make any promises, but I’m hoping that this year will be filled more with projects that I am happy to post about. Not that I haven’t made any worthwhile outfits in my hiatus… that’s the Terrible Blogger part! Perhaps I’ll make a post of my unmentioned projects sometime in the near future.

Now that that’s out of the way, I DO have something to show!

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Hannah B. asked if I could help make a cosplay for a mutual friend, Lauren. I can’t remember if I said yes before or after she sent the next text informing me that I would have less than a week to get it all finished! 🙂
The dress is based on the waitress dress Jenna Coleman wears as Clara, in Doctor Who:

I had my reservations about what I could pull off in the short amount of time we would have to work on it (I’m seriously NOT confident at all. And I know that I’m a slow worker, unfortunately!), since we’d have our own schedules to work around at times.

But! Thanks to the generosity of Hannah B’s mother, allowing us to spend hours in her house working on the dress, we did finish on time for Lauren to wear her dress to meet Jenna Coleman at a convention in Miami!

Sadly, there are no construction photos. I got a new phone in the middle of the whole project, which while awesome for me (my previous phone was a defective wreck that I put up with for almost year), meant I got no photos on the new phone of construction. Just completion.

The finished dress, complete with jeans, no ironing, fresh off the sewing machine, and including some complimentary threads and bits of fuzz:

Isn’t Lauren adorable?!?!?
She made the apron mostly by herself, too! And it’s so cute! I’m partial to the pocket, myself!

For the pattern, I actually just ended up making one myself. Lauren had bought a pattern from Hobby Lobby that had some features of the dress, and I had told her that I could alter it, but none of us expected it to be such an odd and difficult pattern! After an hour of trying to make it work, I decided that I could do a better job making one from scratch. So that’s what I did! It took some time on an already time-crunchy project, but it was worth it. Plus, I welcome the added practice of making patterns for other bodies beside my own.

Now, this was actually my first time doing a collar like this. And cuffs. I think I messed up a lot on the collar. Buuuuuut it’s not super noticeable, unless you’ve got the eyes for it. Next time, I would attach it differently and put another, stiffer layer of fabric in it, so it had more body.

Either way, I’m pleased with how it turned out, and Lauren is happy with it, so that’s what matters to me! 🙂

6 thoughts on “Waitress Clara Cosplay”

Hello Sam! Unfortunately, I do not. I made the pattern myself, basing it off my friend’s figure and the visible lines in photos of the dress.
Sometime over winter break, I may try my hand at making a tutorial, which might prove to be difficult, considering I most likely no longer have the pattern pieces I created, but please do check back sometime later next month; you may be surprised with a more helpful post! At the very least, I can break down the dress in a way that makes it easier to find a commercial pattern, or make one yourself, if you’re up to that.

Thank you for asking, and I am sorry that I am not immediately helpful!